1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of graphical user interfaces and, more specifically, to the field of editing graphical user interfaces.
2. Description of Related Art
At the advent of the personal computer, the command line interface was introduced as the medium for interacting with a computer. The command line interface, however, was difficult for the novice to use and was not user-friendly. Soon after, the graphical user interface (GUI) was introduced. Today, the GUI is the standard for applications and operating systems. GUIs allow users to quickly and easily interact with an application or an operating system via, among other things, a mouse, using the point-and-click method. In addition, GUIs allow users to visually monitor the functions and operations of an application or an operating system. Current GUIs, however, do not come without drawbacks.
Typically, a GUI consists of a variety of widgets including buttons, text fields, text areas, pull-down menus, scroll bars and images. These widgets, however, are normally stationary and cannot be rearranged at runtime. That is, while the application behind the GUI is running, the user cannot rearrange the widgets as he sees fit. One approach to this problem provides a system-wide or application-wide mode whereby functions can be added or deleted from a GUI. However, this approach does not allow for all widgets on a GUI to be rearranged—only a selected group. Another approach to this problem involves allowing the user of a GUI to customize toolbars. This well known feature allows a user to bring up an editor window and rearrange widgets on toolbars in the GUI. This feature, however, does not allow all widgets to be rearranged—only a select group. Furthermore, this feature requires an additional editor window to be displayed, which can cause screen clutter and confuse the user.
Accordingly, there exists a need to overcome these drawbacks with a simple method for rearranging widgets in a GUI.